Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Cara Hoffman, author of Running, published in February by Simon and Shuster.

Cara is the author of the previous novels So Much Pretty, and Be Safe I Love you. She writes for the NYT, The Paris Review, Salon and NPR among others. She’s the winner of a Sundance Filmmaking Award and a MacDowell Fellowship. She received her MFA from Goddard and currently teaches at the University of Southern Maine.

Running is the story of three protagonists. I like to think of Bridey primarily and then Milo and Jasper.

Each is a runner. Running from or to what is what concerns the book to a certain degree, but it’s also comforting, at least for me, who never really wants to be in any one destination that running is a perfectly good lifestyle by itself.

Bridey is a young girl in Athens who befriends Jasper and then Milo and the three of them forge a relationship built from love, trust and a certain disbelief in the escapability of our planet.

The book weaves in and out of the past as well as Athens and New York City, where Milo, now grown and a successful poet, can’t shake off the ghosts of the years in which he found the most in life.

With Jasper and Bridey gone, he yearns for one and seeks the other while trying to establish a stable life for himself, still unwilling to admit to himself that there is a regular world out there, with shoes and socks and iPhones and rain ponchos.

In all, running gives us a chance, especially if we ever lived that life to reminisce about what we may have lost (or not) and if we didn’t live that life then to visualize it in living color, for perhaps the first time.

Welcome Cara and thanks for joining us today